#106 Postby Brent » Mon Dec 27, 2004 6:56 pm
Toll from Asia quake, tsunamis tops 23,000
Millions left homeless; ‘several hundred’ Americans among missing
MSNBC News Services Updated: 6:24 p.m. ET Dec. 27, 2004
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Rescuers piled up bodies along coastlines hit by tsunamis that obliterated seaside towns in Asia and Africa and killed at least 23,700 people in 10 countries, according to a United Nations estimate released Monday.
Hundreds of children were buried in mass graves in India, and morgues and hospitals struggled to cope with the catastrophe. Somalia, some 3,000 miles away from the earthquake that sent tsunamis raging across the Indian Ocean, reported hundreds of deaths.
Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said the International Red Cross reported 23,700 deaths and expressed concern that waterborne diseases like malaria and cholera could increase the terrible toll. He said millions of people were affected — by lost homes, polluted drinking water, destroyed sanitation — and that the cost of the damage would “probably be many billions of dollars.”
“We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone,” he told reporters.
International aid agencies rushed to get food, shelter and clean water to the affected areas.
The terrible tally was expected to keep rising as workers reached remoter regions and the sea washed up more corpses.
Government and aid officials said they had unconfirmed reports of thousands more deaths on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on India’s Andaman and Nikobar islands. Millions more people were displaced from their homes.
On its Web site, the Washington Post reported that a senior Indonesian official estimated that the number of people killed in one western province could be four times higher than earlier government death tolls.
If that new estimate proved accurate, the Post reported, “the number of deaths could eventually total more than 38,000.”
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell reported on American casualties. “At the moment we know of eight Americans who have died, and there are several hundred who are not accounted for yet,” Powell told a news conference.
He said the “several hundred” figure referred to Americans whom authorities had not been able to contact yet, and did not imply they were casualties.
The disaster spared no one. Western tourists were killed sunbathing on beaches, poor villagers drowned in homes by the sea and fishermen died in flimsy boats. Poom Jensen, the 21-year-old Thai-American grandson of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, was killed on a jet ski.
A large proportion of the victims were youngsters, and funerals were held for children and teenagers who could not cope with the fury of the sea. Ted Chaiban, chief for the United Nations Children's Fund in Sri Lanka, estimated that nearly half the victims there were children.
Estimates of the number of dead in the tragedy fluctuated through the day, but U.N. spokeswoman Sian Bowen provided a breakdown that she said was assembled from Red Cross reports.
She said the highest toll was in Sri Lanka, where 12,000 deaths had been reported. Other nations reporting fatalities included India, with 6,000; Indonesia, 4,730; Thailand, 840; Malaysia, 52; the Maldives, 43; Myanmar, 12; and the Seychelles with three, she said.
Bowen said deaths were also reported in Bangladesh, though she had no figures on the number of dead there, and even in Somalia — 3,000 miles away in Africa — where she said nine people had died.
However, Somalian officials said Monday that hundreds of people had died and entire villages and towns had disappeared in flooding.
Individual countries reported death tolls slightly lower than the Red Cross, but the overall number of deaths appears certain to rise.
The emerging picture was even bleaker closer to the epicenter of the massive quake — the most powerful temblor in four decades and the fourth-strongest ever measured.
Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll on the island of Sumatra — closest to the epicenter — could climb to 10,000 people.
On the remote Car Nicobar island south of India, Police Chief S.B. Deol told New Delhi Television he had reports that another 3,000 people may have died.
In Bandah Aceh, Indonesia, 150 miles from the quake’s epicenter, dozens of bloated bodies littered the streets as soldiers and desperate relatives searched for survivors Monday. Some 500 bodies collected by emergency workers lay under plastic tents, rotting in the tropical heat.
“We have ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,” said military spokesman Edy Sulistiadi. “They are mostly retrieving corpses.”
Refugees in nearby Lhokseumawe, many of whom had spent the night sleeping outside on open ground, complained that little or no aid had reached them. The city’s hospital said it was running out of medicine.
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu was also hit hard, with thousands of deaths reported. Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa called the scene “an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented.”
Nearby beaches became open-air mortuaries as fishermen’s bodies washed ashore, and retreating waters left behind others killed inland. In Cuddalore, red-eyed parents held a mass burial for more than 150 children.
The tsunamis came without warning. Witnesses said sea waters at first retreated far out into the ocean, only to return at a vicious pace. Some regions reported a crashing wall of water 30 feet high.
“The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was — a full moon or what? Then we
saw the wave come, and we ran,” said Katri Seppanen, who was in Thailand, on Phuket island’s popular Patong beach.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia had at least a million people each driven from their homes. Warships in Thailand steamed to remote tropical island resorts to search for survivors as air force helicopters in Sri Lanka and India rushed food and medicine to stricken areas.
In Indonesia, villagers near northern Lhokseumawe picked through the debris of their ruined houses amid the smell of decomposing bodies.
One man, Rajali, said his wife and two children were killed and that he couldn’t find dry ground to bury them. Islamic tradition demands that the deceased be buried as soon as possible.
“What shall I do?” said the 55-year-old, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name. “I don’t know where to bury my wife and children.”
In Sri Lanka — an island nation some 1,000 miles west of the epicenter — about 25,000 troops were deployed to crack down on sporadic, small-scale looting and to help in rescue efforts. About 200 inmates took advantage of the chaos, escaping from a prison in coastal Matara.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake’s magnitude was 9.0 — the strongest since a 9.2 magnitude temblor in Alaska in 1964 and the fourth-largest in a century. The quake was more than 6 miles deep and was followed by dozens of powerful aftershocks. A 620-mile section of a geological plate shifted, triggering the sudden displacement of water.
Italy confirmed that 13 of its citizens had died in Thailand. Britain confirmed 11 deaths; Norway 10; Sweden nine; the United States eight; France six; Denmark three; Australia, Belgium, South Africa two; and Finland one.
Malaysia, South Korea, Switzerland, Poland, Japan, Russia, Turkey, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic had unconfirmed reports of dead or missing.
President Bush expressed his condolences on Sunday over the “terrible loss of life and suffering.” From the Vatican, Pope John Paul II led appeals for aid for victims, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million.
Aid agencies and governments around the world began pouring relief supplies into the region. Japan, China, Russia and the United States were among the countries sending teams of experts. Powell also announced that the United States was pledging $15 million in an initial aid package.
Jasmine Whitbread, international director of the aid group Oxfam, warned that without swift action, more people could die. “The flood waters will have contaminated drinking water and food will be scarce,” she said.
In Thailand, Gen. Chaisit Shinawatra, the army chief, said the United States has offered to send troops stationed in Japan’s Okinawa island to assist. Thailand was considering the offer.
Tsunamis as large as Sunday’s happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.
An international tsunami warning system was started in 1965, after the Alaska quake, designed to advise coastal communities of a potentially killer wave.
Member states include all the major Pacific Rim nations in North America, Asia and South America. But because tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, India and Sri Lanka are not part of the system. Scientists said the death toll would have been reduced if they had been.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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#neversummer
That's just unbelievable.
